Once you dive beyond the cozy light-filled portions of the sea, life gets weird. Real weird.
Working on a deep sea fishing boat based in the Russian port city of Murmansk, Roman Fedortsov regularly gets up-close-and-personal with strange beasts after they accidentally get caught up in the boat's nets. Most of them are simply too weird not share with the world, so that’s exactly what he does through his Twitter and Instagram feeds.
Roman regularly posts snaps of whatever he and the crew come across, including eerie ghost sharks, rejects from the movie Alien, living blob things, creatures banished to hell long ago, and – very occasionally – some wonderfully pretty things.
Ok, so perhaps us ground-dwellers shouldn't be too harsh on these odd organisms. Deep down in the depths of the sea, it’s pitch-black. Normally, only a small amount of sunlight penetrates beyond 200 meters (656 feet) and by 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) there is no light at all. There’s also a hell of a lot of pressure when you have thousands of meters of water crushing down on you.These conditions mean that creatures have had to adapt to a vastly different environment from earth-dwelling animals or even those found in shallower waters.
Furthermore, most of these creatures have a swim bladder, which is specially adapted to these intense depths. When brought to the water's surface where there’s considerably lower pressure, this sac of gas can blow up, causing the creature’s body to distend and look asymmetrical.
We wrote about Roman’s shenanigans last year and since then, he’s continued to pump out image after image. Take a look at a small selection of his finds below. Don’t have nightmares.
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